Objective-C / Cocoa, "First Responder" - Did I get that right?

Question

Let me summarize that shortly: A "First Responder" in a NibFile is an Object, which represents the UI control element that has the user's focus. So if the user klicks on an UI control, the Nib sets that clicked UI control as First Responder. In my app I could make an outlet to that "First Responder" from the Nib, so that I could for example send a message "make red font color" to whatever the user has activated by clicking.

And then, if this First Responder UI control does not understand that message, the message gets passed up in the responder chain, until a parent element or grandparent (and so on) UI control element understands the message. Otherwise it will be ignored.

So First Responder always establishes a "link" to the UI control that has focus. Is that right?

Answer 1

Check this link out it does a good job explaining. I think you have the gist of it:

http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?FirstResponder

From the source:

The FirstResponder is the first object in the responder chain that is given the opportunity to respond to an event.

Answer 2

Your understanding is incomplete. The responder chain includes more than what we'd usually think of as "UI controls," including most importantly the current document. One of the big benefits is that it allows you to interact with the conceptually "current" whatever — current window, current text field, current document, etc — without a lot of messing around to find it.

Answer 3

Right overall picture, wrong implementation details in the first paragraph.

A "First Responder" in a NibFile is an Object …

No, actually, First Responder is nil. Connecting a UI control (e.g., button) to First Responder in a nib is equivalent to [control setTarget:nil] in code.

The reason for the First Responder fake-object in the nib window is that, in IB, you set target and action at the same time (ctrl-drag to target, choose action from pop-up menu). You can't set the action and leave the target unset, like you can in code, so to set it to nil, you need to do so explicitly. That's what First Responder is for: it's a fake object representing nil, so you can set the target and action the same way you would do when setting it to a specific real target.

Of course, you can't use this to set anything else to nil, only views' targets. You can only use it to mean First Responder, not anything else.

So if the user klicks on an UI control, the Nib sets …

The nib doesn't do anything. It's just a freeze-dried collection of objects stored on disk. Even when you instantiate NSNib, all you're doing is defrosting some objects. It's the objects that do things.

In the case at hand, when you unarchive the control you connected to First Responder from the nib, its target is set to nil (remember, that's what First Responder really is: a target of nil). When a control's target is nil, and the user clicks on it, it sends its action to whichever responder is the first responder at the time.

Your second and third paragraphs are correct.

Answer 4

A responder is any object that will perform actions (call functions) when events (such as clicking on buttons) occur. The responder chain is a sequence of objects each contained in one another - for example a button inside a panel inside a window. When an event occurs, we iterate through the chain until we find an object that does not have a responder set to nil and which can therefore respond to the event. So instead of providing a responder object for each button in a window, we can provide a single responder for the whole window. The first responder is simply the first object inside the responder chain - linking an event to the first responder allows the event to pass up the chain.